Random Ramblings from Mom about biking, kids, and food, with the occasional sprinkling of science fiction references. It's all good!

Back at it.

October 4, 2013

by Erin B

Back to school really, truly is in full swing. Despite inability to get text books, the bookstore sending out the wrong course manual and lack of information about exams and labs, the last class I need for my diploma is up and running.

I received the corrected course manual in the post yesterday. My midterm is next Friday. I don’t know why they seem to always schedule these thing during Thanksgiving break when Little girl is home from school and I have to frantically try to find care for her but this is two years in a row that they have.

This class is Digital Imagining. I am already using a CR unit. In theory I could challenge the exam. In reality, it doesn’t work that way. No one will tell you what challenging the exam involves until you commit to writing it. Once you commit, you only have two weeks to prepare. The set up feels like playing chicken. Pay the fee, then we tell you what you just bought.

There is an expression “buying a pig in poke.” It is so old that most people don’t understand that the other half of that expression is “cat out of the bag.” The whole story is that people would sell a piglet in a bag. It made sense. Easy way to contain it, keep it from getting away what you were at the market. Unscrupulous people found that a cat was about the same size, same level of squirming and a heck of a lot less valuable. If you buy a pig in a poke, you might let the cat out of the bag.

But I digress.

I just wasn’t comfortable paying a fee, paying a week of groceries, to challenge the exam without more information about what that meant. If it wasn’t a reasonable possibility, I would be out the money and still have to pay the full course fee. We don’t have money for that. As it stands I had to borrow money for the tuition and sell some of my household items to pay for the textbook.

I know that in a couple of year, Little Girl will be in school full day and I will find a job that actually gives me some hours. It’s just that right now, when I am working so hard to get my diploma, spending money we don’t have to buy the courses, while at the same time going more that two months between work shifts and effectively having no income… The whole mess is kind of depressing.

I just want to get the whole thing over and done with, but so far it has been a lot of work and even more frustration. I don’t understand how any business can run this way. How do you sell the wrong course material and take a third the class time to correct your mistake?

Still, it’s better that the last one where I took the whole class and the text book didn’t ever arrive before the final exam. This class uses the same text book and it finally arrived only days before we were due to start in September. Two weeks before the current class started, I had to complain to the distance eduction department and flat out insist on a refund if it wasn’t here in the next 10 business days because it still hadn’t been ordered yet. Not that having the text helps when the list of reading assignments was wrong.

It’s the only game in town, so I guess that’s what you get.

All of that aside, the whom I have never met, seems good. He has been diligent about posting note to the class website and offering self quizzes. I am doing well based on the notes provided. I have no idea what to expect on the midterm.